With the arrival of Patch 2.3, one of the most exciting things to me, both as a Guild Leader and a helplessly addicted Auction Hall player, was the addition of the long-awaited guild banks. Man, oh man, I’ve been waiting for this feature. Nothing sucks more than losing a newly crafted Lionheart Helm (back in the day when that was the best) because you started playing an alt and forgot it in the mailbox for an entire 30 days after an expired auction. Guild banks will allow us to throw everything for sale into the bank, and as GL, I can buy my own stinking tab for a while to store more than my mule can handle without worrying about losing stuff in the mail.
Before I logged off Tuesday night, I got on my GL toon and went to Shattrath City to investigate the process of getting a Guild Vault going. What took me 5-10 minutes should be a breeze for you now, so thank me later, ok?

Prance, gallop, run, or fly into a major city and find the bank. Near the bank will be a Guild Vault, each with a unique look for the city. Orgrimmar’s, for example, is a pot of gold (Lucky Charms, anyone?).

Ensure you have 100g on yourself, because that’s what it’s going to take. Ouch, I know, but check out all the space! With each tab you buy, you get a whopping 98 slots. That’s nearly an entire personal bank per tab, so for the initial investment for a small guild, it’s definitely worth it. The next two tabs increase to 250g and 500g each.

When you’ve got your tab, go to Guild Control and set the permissions for the guild ranks. You can customize the ability to view, deposit, and withdraw for each rank indivudually, including withdraw limits so new initiates can’t ninja the guild’s vast stockpiles of valuable raid mats. This will take a little bit of time at the beginning, but your stuff is worth it, right?

Start filling up your slots to your heart’s content. It will take a little while to figure out a system for storage for the different items based on permissions and the little details like that, but again, the time spent now is worth it.

Log in to your alts and open the doors to the vault to your guild and start a bank party today. Drinks are served in the nearby inn, of course.

NOTE: I noticed tonight that the vault does not stack items. I think this is to trick us into buying new tabs when we don’t need them, but I digress. To get things to stack, place them in your bags (carefully if you have a low withdrawal limit) where they stack, and then re-deposit them into the vault.

NOTE: This just in from Druidr, my newly bear formed alt: the Guild Vault in Thunder Bluff is just outside the bank! Don’t go running all over the place looking for it in a tent. It’s right in front of your eyes, but it looks like a plain old totem. This makes Thunder Bluff quite possibly the best place in all of Azeroth to be a blacksmith/miner. You have the mailbox, AH, trainers, forge, anvil, AND Guild Vault all right in one area. Paladr is very happy now.

Brian Kopp, author of the extremely successful Alliance 1-70 leveling guides has just finished updating his guide for WoW 2.3! Kopp’s guide is touted as one of the fastest ways to level an Alliance character and with the increased quest experience and decreased leveling requirements that went live with 2.3, things have only gotten better.

According to Kopp – the changes in 2.3 now allow players to easily level from 1-60 with absolutely ZERO grinding!

Other changes include:

Levels 20-60 reworked for patch 2.3 so that all the improved experience changes were documented. This now allows the guide to be 100% questing 1-60 and no grinding

Enlarged the font and changed it to a cleaner style

Removed border from edge of pages while changing the margins slightly

Added page numbers to all pages

Separated the guide into 3 sections. One section for all the starting races up to 20, one section for 20-60 and one section for 60-70

Kopp is also offering level 1-20 of this guide for free! If you’ve ever been curious about how these guides look, this is an excellent chance to see it in action and try it for yourself. Gitr Knows WoW is an affiliate for Brian’s leveling guide – so we’re a bit biased on its quality. Don’t take our word – try it out yourself. For $35 you get the full guide, an in-game map mod that includes preset way points and notes for each quest, and a lifetime of free updates.

These silly things are pretty awesome looking. They are non-binding bits of vanity gear that drop off of rarely found, stealthed blood elf bandits on Azuremyst Isle. Unlike the plain red defias bandit masks that drop off of brotherhood rogues in Westfall, the Blood Elf Bandit Mask is not class specific, anyone can wear one! Alliance players that are patient enough to hunt down these stealthed level 7 blood elf bandits on Azuremyst Isle have a fairly decent chance of getting one. For those of you that don’t know, Azuremyst Isle and the Exodar are only a quick boat ride from Auberdine. Horde players are going to have a tougher time of it. High level Horde rogues and druids can easily stealth their way onto the boat. So if you have a higher level horde main (preferably with an epic mount) you can show up on Azuremyst unscathed and spend your next hour or more tearing around the island hunting these guys.

For lower level Horde characters intent on acquiring a mask – be prepared for either a looong ghost run from the Barrens or Ashenvale – or – you can make your way to Auberdine and let yourself get killed near (or on) the Azuremyst Boat. You’ll likely get murdered again once you get off the boat – so make sure to be doing this little jaunt ‘sans-gear’ or you’ll have a repair bill to go along with what could be hours of fruitless searching.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with Auberdine or which boat goes where. Simply find the inn and check out the pier. There are two boats that have historically docked here. About halfway out the pier is a ‘t’ junction – where the boats to Menethil Harbor and Ruth’theran Village have always docked. The newest boat arrives at the far end of the pier (there are signs – try to look for them if you’re running from the Auberdine guards!)

How to Find Them

There are a number of known spawn points that ring the island. With a high level main and an epic mount, you can cover a lot of ground quickly. Everyone else – best bet is to pick a region and camp the spawn points. Re-pop time on these guys is somewhere between 2 and 5 minutes – with the next bandit appearing at a new location after the last is killed.

Click on the map to see known spawn points and a suggested route to take to find these guys

Hordies that aren’t uber leveled are suggested to take an alternate routes anytime the path crosses too close to the Exodar

A simple macro can also help snuffle these guys out. Just create a new macro and type the following:

/target Blood Elf

Put that on an action bar somewhere and just spam the crap out of it as you race around Azuremyst Isle. If you manage to find one this way – stop immediately and start searching in a tight circular pattern until you either see his stealthed figure – or he ambushes you. Either works.

Anyway – I hope this has been entertaining and helpful. For those of you that are hard to teach or resistant to helpful tips – here are a few that I can’t stress enough.

1. These guys are on Azuremyst Isle – not Bloodmyst Isle
2. A mask won’t drop with every kill
3 Others are hunting these guys at the same time you are.
4. This might take minutes…it might take hours.

I killed elves on Bloodmyst Isle for over an hour one night thinking that the masks randomly dropped off the packs of blood elves camped behind Blood Watch. I gained a level in that time and gathered stacks of cloth – but no mask. A little google searching and some patience would have saved me that trouble.

I’ve Got One..Now What?

Wear it dummy! Give it to a friend – give it to a favorite 10-19 battleground twink! Or do like a lot of other folks are doing and sell that bad dog. Prices are variable these days so selling them is still a bit of a hit and miss thing. WoW Econ is showing historical prices on the Alliance side to be running around a 10G average over the month of November, 2007 – though your server economy will dictate. Back in the early days of the Burning Crusade, these cheese-cloth wonders would fetch as much as 25-50G. The fervor has died down somewhat, but you can still make a tidy sum selling to folks willing to pay well for RP clothes or who simply want a unique look on their latest alt.

Matching Robe?

According to some folks – there is another drop available on Azuremyst that makes a great compliment to the mask. The Silvermoon Robe Family are a fairly nice couple of cloth robes that would make any level ALT level 13-20 feel like the best dressed toon in Azeroth. The robe usually drops off of Fenissa the Assassin (rare mob) who can be found around the Vector Coil or Cryo Core (she stays stealthed, but you can usually find her fairly easily.)

Growl’s Experience Hunting The Mask

Growl has managed to nab 4 of these things. I haven’t managed to find one dropping in any one location more than I have the other – so I can’t recommend choice hunting spots. The best bet is to keep an eye out around the marked spawn locations and hope you get lucky. The drop rate isn’t spectacular – but it isn’t bad either. The real problem is finding the bloody belf where ever he happens to be on the map. I’ve circumnavigated Azuremyst for an hour straight and not seen the blighter before. Other times – I’ve had him start stabbing me in the kidneys when I least expected it. As usual with most rare drops and rare spawn in the game – your mileage may vary – and vary wildly.

Windows Vista is supposed to be a fair bit more secure than past versions of Windows. Whether it is or not I’ll leave up to people that know more about OS security than I do. However, a number of WoW players are having trouble getting patch 2.3 to install on Windows Vista. The problem? Security!

Here’s the deal…The patch downloads correctly but when downloader completes and fires off the installer – the install fails. The problem – is one of permissions.

Most Vista installs are setup in such a way that the average user you are logged in as is not an administrator of the machine. If you’re not an administrator – you can’t install or patch software.

The solution is simple. Right click your World of Warcraft icon and select “Run as administrator”. This will start WoW running with administrator permissions instead of your local users permissions. The system will run through the patch process – but this time when the installer fires off, it’s running as an admin. The game should patch correctly and you’ll be pWning in no time!

I love macros – and I have over a dozen of them written for different characters on all of my servers. Last week I bought a new computer and installed WOW on it. But now it looks like I need to re-write all of my macros on this new install! What a pain! Is there any way to bring my old macros over to my new computer?

Thanks!

Wardance
Thorium Brotherhood US

Great question Wardance – and the short answer is “Yes” – you can take your macros with you when you change computers. It’s actually a pretty easy! I’ll even use pictures to show how to do it! If you can’t read the thumbnails – just click the image for a larger view!

First off you need to understand that there are two kinds of macros. For simplicities sake we’re going to call them:

General Macros and Character Specific Macros

What’s the difference? Easy – just open up your macro interface while you’re in game. You’ll notice that the macro creation window has two tabs.

The default tab in the macro creation window are for macros that will be available to *every* character you play. No matter which toon you’re logged onto – you can always open up the macro creation interface and those same macros will be available to every character in your account. The default tab is a great place to put commonly used macros that all of your characters might use – like common emotes, bandage macros, and trade or guild barkers.

The second tab is character specific. In other words – if Wardance is logged on and he creates a macro in tab-2 (Wardance’s Macros) – those macros will *only* be available to that character. This tab is a great place to put macros that your other toons don’t need access to. For example – the hunter you have on the same account isn’t going to need a macro that will help him spam “Sunder Armor and Shield Block.”

Blizzards developer trolls save these macros in text files and store them on your hard-drive. By knowing where you look for the files themselves, you can easily take them with you to another install of World of Warcraft by simply copying the files to a memory-stick or a portable hard-drive. The files are quite small, so you shouldn’t have a problem taking them with you.

The first thing you need to do is learn where your macros live. For most players on Windows Systems you’ll simply need to look on your hard-drive for your World of Warcraft installation.

PC Users:

Most likely your WOW install lives in one of two places:

C:\World of Warcraft or C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft

Mac Users:

Just open your Applications Folder – it’s in there (too easy!)

One thing to keep in mind is that the Mac and PC Installs are virtually identical in regards to the folder structures that we’re going to be working with. I use a mac much of the time – so the majority of the screen shots will be from a Mac. PC users – don’t fear – your World of Warcraft folder looks virtually identical. For what we’re here to do today – all of the folder and file names are exactly the same.

So – the next step is to find the WTF folder (no jokes please) – the WTF folder holds user interface (UI) and addon information for each of your characters. Inside of the WTF folder is a folder called “Account” that includes all of the registered accounts you use to play the game.

Select your account name and open that folder. Inside are a number of files – look for the following:

macros-cache.txt
This is where Blizzard hides your General Macros. To take these macros with you – simply grab a copy of the file and move it to the same location on your new computer.

To find your Character Specific Macros, look at the other folders here. If you play characters on multiple servers, you’ll see a folder for each server you play on. Find the server that houses the character whose macros you’d like to copy and open that folder.

Inside are folders for all of the characters you “own” on that server. Find the character who’s macros you’d like to bring with you and open that folder. Inside you’ll find another macros-cache.txt file. In this file are all of that characters custom macros.

Now this is pretty simple to do, but there’s actually an easier way to bring not only your macros, but also all of your key-bindings, addon settings, and interface settings along to a new computer. Simply copy the entire WTF folder and place it on your new computer.

If you choose to do this – use caution. Corrupt or overly large WTF folders are often the cause of a great deal of problems for WoW players, including graphical problems and increased lag.

That said, if your current install is problem free, it’s often not a bad idea to keep a backup of your WTF folder on a thumb-drive or external hard-drive. I travel a lot and often swap between a work laptop (with WOW on it) or any of two or three different Mac or PC laptops that belong in our family. I always keep an updated copy of my Addons folder (to keep all of my addons updated) and a copy of my WTF folder. If I’m going out of town and plan on playing a little WoW – I’ll make sure to update the install on the computer that I’ll be bringing with me – with the most recent versions of both of these folders. That way – all of my addons are current – and I don’t have to recreate any of my UI settings or rewrite any macros!

When Things Don’t Work

I found my macros files on my old system and went to copy it to the WTF->Accounts->Account Name folder on my new computer. But the folder wasn’t there. Did it get deleted? Am I looking in the wrong place?

No – chances are – you’re working with a brand new install and haven’t yet logged into the game or played a character on this new install. Until you log into the game and into the game world on a character – the folders you’re looking for won’t exist. The same can be said for your character specific macros. If you’ve never logged that character in on your new system – that characters folder won’t exist. Log into the character first – then close out of the game and find the folder!

That’s all for today! Macros are great tools and can help give you the edge in a number of situations. Don’t lose all the hard work you’ve put into those macros by not knowing how to back them up! If you run into questions or know of other great ways to make your WoW more portable – e-mail to us here at Gitrknowswow!